Hoop And Holler: It`s Basketball Time

The game of flailing arms and hardwood floors just doesn`t get any better than when it is played by gangly kids in front of their screaming friends and families.

In fact, beyond high school, basketball becomes progressively more boring. Even in college it is played by slam-dunking giants who are in it for the money, paid in the form of scholarships, of course.

At the pro level, spectating at a basketball game is like watching the same circus act over and over until you wonder why you didn`t bring along something to read.

But in high school! Lord! Lord!

High school basketball is like having poison ivy and not being able to scratch. It`s war without bullets, an earthquake that doesn`t end and puppy love at the dog show with all the cages open.

On a recent night here in the Illinois capital, high school tournament action was on the bill at the Prairie Convention Center, just across the street from the hotel where I stayed.

Now under most circumstances I wouldn`t walk across the street to watch a basketball game. But I walked across for a couple of them on this night and it was enough to pump my soul full of helium, put me on a popcorn diet and flunk me back into adolescence.

High school basketball isn`t just a game. In March, all across the country, it is a way of life. It has become a seasonal ritual that snaps a mother`s apron strings tighter than a guard dog`s leash and gives new meaning to the flowering of youth.

If kids were butterflies, March basketball would be the opening of the cocoons. Following a winter of constraint and years of character development and hibernation, there is a kind of explosive emerging. You can feel it when you are young. It is like spiders in your blood, and it can fill your heart with agony and ecstacy in the same second.

The convention center here is a cavernous thing that might intimidate some activities and their participants. But not high school basketball. The players and the spectators occupy the confines like a great flock of migrating birds, its fluttering members filled with intense natural excitment at being where they are and enormously stimulated by the prospect of where they might be going.

The blare of band music. The thunder of stamping feet. The chants of organized cheers. The screams and shouts. The rude blast of the timekeeper`s horn. This mixture of special sounds comes to the ears of a high school student like the symphony of life in a very personal concert.

At any age, you cannot hear it and fail to remember how it once played for you.

The young men bound recklessly up and down the hardwood court, their shoes making little squeaking sounds, like the yips of puppies. They seem possessed of limitless energy and they pass the ball back and forth with quick snaps of their wrists.

They take leaping chances, seeming to defy gravity. Sometimes there is glory in the risk, and sometimes there is a bone-jarring fall to the floor.

All of it, of course, every move and feint, is accompanied by a chorus of screams and screeches.

Squads of cheerleaders, as supple as squirrels and as healthy as babies, do their practiced routines. It is a wonderfully ridiculous activity that has absolutely no application to real life, but is incredibly important at these moments.

The whole of high school basketball is the last stand of glorious childhood. It is a wild ceremony to mark the end of a time of innocence. Tomorrow, next month, a year from now, the rigid roles assigned here will have faded in importance. The stars, the bench riders, the cheerleaders and the spectators will just be people with routine lives to lead.

They will be out in the cruel world, trying, as the system dictates, to fit into the web of society more like spiders and less like flies.

It will dawn on all of them sooner or later, that no matter what or how they fit themselves into the grand scheme of things, no other community will give them what high school did. And never again will they celebrate membership in anything with the glory and intensity of participating in high school basketball.

So there is this magnificient show on the high school basketball courts in March. It screams with life, reeks of symbolism, dribbles your heart back over the years and turns you briefly into a teenager.